Record Player

A short poem about music

 I always thought there was something beautiful in instrumental music. The lack, or want of lyrics, made each note, subtly succinct or elaborately elongated, that much more powerful. I remember my mother listening to these harmonies, these tunes, on a record player long outdated with records covered in dust. And yet, in between the scratching of the speakers and the faults on the large circular disc, the music penetrated a spirit inside me I had truly yet to discover. I was only a child when my parents sat and listened to the music, leaving me alone in the middle, my brother old enough to have gone out with his friends. The music surrounded me, the faults in it became part of my knowledge of the world. And my parents, these stoic figures sitting in tall chairs. Never together, but never quite separate.

I never touched the record player on my own. My mother made it clear that my grimy hands and sharp nails, torn from the earth, were not to touch things as delicate as her decade-old records. And yet I longed to touch, longed to rub the back of my hand against the delicate black circle that held the notes that took me on various journeys throughout the world. Sometimes I was transported back in time to a small club, listening to Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis Jr., their voices softly crooning through the microphone. In my imagination I was there, I was wearing the loosely fitting dress and my hair was perfectly coifed. With one touch of the record I thought I could have been transported again. But the stare of my mother, the wrath of her silence upon eyeing a single scratch, sent me running to my room, picturing the discs surrounding my bed.

It was never my father's glare that frightened me so. In fact, it was never my father's eyes that made me feel. For he was as empty as the dust covers of the used records, waiting to be filled again once my mother was finished with her listening. Except I never remember a time in which my father's eyes lit again. I waited, I remembered, at dinner tables for those eyes to shine at my accomplishments, or at least glow red with anger at my brother's failures. But they never managed to show past the glaze that covered them for what I assume was many years. He sat, unmoved by any day's news, and I remember being so disappointed every evening I did not find a way to bring life to his face. Each night that went without a smile, a true dimple of happiness, fragmented my young heart more. I eventually gave up this nonsense, hoping that a musical note would show in his face. That one day, the record player would produce something at which he would react. I spent days, nights, weeks, months, sitting on the floor of his living room, watching his face. Going between mother's and father's. Waiting for their eyes to meet, for their faces to form the emotions of the songs, for their attention to be disrupted from the firm hold of alcohol on my mother and the tight grasp of a novel on my father. But when I was stacked against a deep red wine and Ernest Hemingway, I stood absolutely no chance. And yet I tried, evening after evening, praying to finally see the spark for which I had so desperately longed.

But nothing about their faces appeared altered by the deep sounds coming from the rusty speakers. To them, a hollow noise. As I felt the chords rise within me, I saw nothing but faltering, whimpering notes, striving to reach my father and mother, only to collapse on the floor in a heap next to me. The pile growing larger with every song. Every night they would try again. The weak flocking to my young, growing soul, the strong trying aimlessly to penetrate the steel fortresses of their tired souls. Souls that, grown weary from the fallout of love, happiness, and promise, would never again open up to the simple and hopeful note. Souls that would not find both the sadness and eagerness of a broken heart in a single strum of the guitar, or the delicate movement of the violin. How lonely, I thought, it is to be an adult. To play the same songs again and again, yet never hearing the music. I was a child then. But I knew what it was to feel. To cry. To want. To hear the scratching on the record player and to know that another world was waiting to take me away. Where I loved who I wanted and sat softly in a field, only notes surrounding my head, filling my thoughts. Chords progressing, love changing, hands holding, and keys pressing. The piano, the violin, the guitar, the cello, the drums...they all sang to me on that short, beige carpet inside my parent's living room. My mother's records, playing each night with the same dignity, playing to an audience of one.

And when I heard those sounds, those songs, those desperate measures, I knew what it was to become. Each painstaking second that that the sound traveled to my ears, each instantaneous moment, was the big bang. Each earth unraveling itself in the next note, the next key stroke. And with each second, I became. I became a human capable of that beyond words, a human capable of love beyond measures. A child, still hopeful and yet a woman still growing, each layer of music slowly shedding until the raw notes hit me like a solo piano in a chamber orchestra. I became myself. I became a woman, a man, a child, an adult, all in one.

And I absorbed the beauty on the beige carpet of a lifeless family, waiting each morning for the peace and solitude that the evening record brought.